Thursday, December 19, 2013

Realizing Your Full Potential

Has someone in your life ever told
you that you had lots of potential?Yeah, me too.Sounds pretty good.

But the more I thought about this,
I began to wonder if being told (or telling someone) they have potential is not
a compliment but an insult.In essence,
aren’t you being told “You’re nothing special now, kid, but if you apply
yourself, you might amount to something.”

If someone is young with their
whole life spread out before them, do they not have potential?Put another way, doesn’t EVERYONE have
potential?OK, maybe not potential for
everything.But everyone has potential
for something.

Take me for example.The potential for me to play power forward
for the Lakers or to become a supermodel is probably slim.But the potential for me to spit out the
great American novel someday is there.At least, I’m going to go on believing it’s there.Let’s leave it at that.

So when people talk about someone
not living up to their full potential, what exactly does that mean?Are they saying that the person in question
ended up just an “Average Joe” rather than becoming someone “special”?Maybe living the Average Joe life was Joe’s
full potential.He could have become a
homeless, crack addict or a commentator for Fox News.But instead, Joe reached his full
potential.He rose above.

Let’s look at it from another
perspective.You have two students who
receive a B average in math.One works
her ass off.It doesn’t come easy for
her.But she puts in the long hours,
works diligently with a math tutor and despite the odds, succeeds at attaining
the B average.The other student is a
math whiz.She loves numbers, loves the
challenge of math and typically finds math class easy, if not a little on the
boring side.Maybe our math whiz doesn’t
do the homework assignments or prepare for exams.And why should she?With almost no effort on her part, she’s able
to comfortably pull in a B average.

In this scenario, many of us would
probably characterize the first student as realizing her full potential, but say
that the second student, our math whiz, was not working up to her full
potential.Am I wrong?

Didn’t both students have the
“potential” to earn an A average?Probably.And if I hadn’t given you the background on
each student, you would have judged their B averages the same.

One more perspective.We all know people who have succeeded well
beyond their abilities.You know who I
mean.The people who have failed upward –
have risen to the level of their own incompetence.The people you never expected would amount to
anything that you find out are running huge departments, companies or holding
offices of high prestige.These are
contrasted with the group of people who always impressed you -- the gang voted
most likely to succeed – who end up not becoming the world changers we expected
them to be.We would probably say the
latter group failed to live up to their potential.But what about this first group?Is it possible to EXCEED your potential?Does such a thing exist?If you accomplished it, then you had the
potential to become it all along.Maybe
you just did a good job hiding your true potential.

At the end of the day, I guess we
all like to think we have potential to accomplish more than we have, be more
than we are, climb to even higher heights than we have.While that may be the case, I’m always a big
proponent of being thankful each day for what we do have, what we have
accomplished.It’s good to push yourself
in search of your full potential, just don’t ignore all of the good stuff
you do and achieve along the way.